Video: Looking at the post work done on some of the food photos

Male: I would like to show you a few of the things that I do to improve my images using post-processing software. So, I'm going to look at this picture here and see right away that it's a little flat. It's lacking some contrast. So, in Lightroom's Develop module I'm going to come over to the basic panel, and I'm going to move the clarity slider to the right, and that's going to bump up the mid-tone contrast. And right away there's an improvement. I'm also going to move my black slider to the left.

Watch the Online Video Course Travel Photography: Portrait of a City Neighborhood

1h 19mIntermediateAug 07, 2013

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When you're traveling, you sometimes want to spend a day or two exploring the neighborhood where you're staying—just walking around with your camera, absorbing the neighborhood's personality, and assembling a collection of photos that, together, form a portrait of the neighborhood. These photos are a great way to bring your experiences home to share.

In this course, photographer and teacher Mikkel Aaland explores one of the oldest and most beautiful neighborhoods of San Francisco: North Beach, home to iconic architecture, beautiful vistas, delicious food, and more than a few interesting people. He explores the area on foot over a three-day period, taking you up hills, inside restaurants and shops, and into encounters with people on the street. Along the way, learn how to take advantage of natural light, shoot a city at night, pack and prep for travel shoots, and enhance your images in post-production.

Looking at the post work done on some of the food photos

Male: I would like to show you a few of thethings that I do to improve my images using post-processing software.So, I'm going to look at this picture hereand see right away that it's a little flat.It's lacking some contrast.So, in Lightroom's Develop module I'm going tocome over to the basic panel, and I'm goingto move the clarity slider to the right,and that's going to bump up the mid-tone contrast.And right away there's an improvement.I'm also going to move my black slider to the left.

going to darken the blacks, give it more contrast.But by doing that I've also closed down the shadow areas and lost detail there.Now, Lightroom has a wonderful shadow recovery capability, by just moving theshadow slider over to the right I'll open up the shadow areas.And also I can recover details that are lost in the highlightsby moving highlight slider over to the left, which I've also done here.And then finally I've moved the exposure value slightly overto the right, increasing the exposure and brightening the image slightly.

That's it, it just took those few things to make this image better.Okay let's take a look at this picture here, this was shot in the bakery.The exposure from my camera point of view on the highlights is correct.The highlights have details, everything looks good from the highlightpoint of view, but the shadows have gone too dark.I've lost detail in the shadows.Again, in Lightroom it's so easy just to move theShadow slider to the right, open up the shadow area.Now you can see his arm you can see more ofthe apron, more of his shirt, more of his face, andthat's pretty much all you need to do there.

I've also increased the contrast by moving the clarity slider to the right.And that boosts the mid tone contrast.I oftentimes use that clarity slider to that,it works wonders on images, especially images like this.Okay this picture here is from a exposurepoint of view it was pretty straight forward.The clarity sliderboosts the mid tone contrast nicely. I also did a little bit shadow recoveryand a little bit of highlight recovery. Very slight, movements in those sliders.

The main thing here was the shot itself was shot, where it wasn't level.But Light Room 5 has these wonderful new, upright perspective controls.But with a single click ofthe, of the mouse you can straighten the image out, which I've done here.Now, the other thing that you can see right away is that the, thewhite balance has been changed, and that'sbecause originally the white balance was off.There was a mixture of daylight, there was also some neon, and some incandescent.

I had to go in and create a customwhite balance, and that was easily done in Light Room.And because I'm shooting raw.It doesn't matter what my original white balancesetting was, I can always change it later.And so with those 3 things, by changing thewhite balance, working with the exposures and clarity, and thenthe perspective control found with the new upright control inLightroom, I got a much better picture out of it.This picture here very straight forward a little bit of clarityboosting the mid tone contrast.

Opening up some of the shadows with the shadow slider.the highlight recovery was very important here because in the back through thewindow you can see the highlights are pretty blown out there in the original.But by moving the highlight slider to the leftI'm recovering a lot of those lost highlight details.And that's it for that photograph, it was very,very straightforward.So you can see my overall process inthese images was very, very straight forward, very quick.

Now I'm ready to go out and take some more pictures.This has been great.

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